Word: tobacco
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Senator John McCain stood in his office, his eyes squeezed into slits and his hands choking the back of a chair. "O.K., what? What?!" he barked. It was mid-morning on March 25, and two of his aides were telling him that the tobacco deal he had painstakingly negotiated among impossibly contrarian parties was disintegrating yet again--this time over how much authority the Food and Drug Administration should have to regulate tobacco products. McCain studied his hands for a moment, as if he were surprised to see the rubber band that he always keeps around his right wrist. Then...
That advice served him well during negotiations that concluded last week with the Senate Commerce Committee's voting 19-1 for a sweeping $506 billion tobacco bill. Although tobacco companies are already threatening legal action and anti-tobacco lawmakers are promising to fight for a tougher bill, some version of the McCain Act will probably pass the full Senate by Memorial Day. If the House follows suit, by year's end the President will be signing the most significant public health legislation in a decade...
...what Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore thought he had negotiated last year when he reached a $368.5 billion settlement on behalf of 40 states. But support quickly vanished. Bill Clinton backed away amid protests by the health lobby and some Democrats that the deal was too easy on Big Tobacco. "I looked around," Moore recalls, "and there was nobody behind...
Certainly not McCain's fellow Republicans, who were finding their addiction to tobacco money difficult to give up. Instead, they created the illusion of action by spreading the many components of the settlement among various committees--much as kids spread lima beans around their plates to create the illusion of eating them...
...special feature, TIME Daily takes a Closer Look at the ultimately untenable alliance between Big Tobacco and Big Brother and the collapse of their deal...